During a long and distinguished career, the English-born actress Anna Lee starred in How Green Was My Valley, played one of the singing nuns in The Sound of Music and, despite being confined to a wheelchair in later years, became a regular on the
classic American daytime soap opera General Hospital.
She began in ''quota quickies'' in England in the 1930s, but a decade later, Photoplay/Movie Mirror declared ''The lady is a symbol . . . She is England in America.''
Anna had her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and commanded a huge following through General Hospital, on which she was a regular for 25 years.
Fans were outraged when her character was axed last year and launched a major campaign to save her. ABC insisted they would bring her back, but by that time she
was already in ill health. Ironically, she was due to receive a lifetime achievement Emmy award when she died of
pneumonia at home in Los Angeles, aged 91.
Born Joan Boniface Winnifrith in Kent, in 1913, goddaughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Sybil Thorndike.
Her father was a minister, who ran a private primary school, where she was the only female pupil, wearing the same uniform and cropped hair as her classmates.
In time-honoured fashion, she ran away to join the circus. She returned to school, subsequently studied drama and worked as a model before breaking into movies, under the name Anna Lee. Considered a great beauty, she was the model for the two figures in the Scottish artist William Russell Flint's 1932 painting Bronze and Silver.
After a series of small roles, she co-starred with Jessie Matthews in First a Girl (1935), remade almost half a century later, with Julie Andrews, as Victor/Victoria, and starred opposite Paul Robeson in the original 1937 version of King Solomon's Mines. It was
directed by her then-husband Robert Stevenson, one of several British films they made together before moving to Hollywood at the end of the 1930s.
Blonde, blue-eyed, and with slightly delicate features, Lee made an immediate impression alongside Marlene
Dietrich and John Wayne in Seven Sinners (1940), and as Ronald Colman's dopey wife in the comedy My Life with Caroline (1941), as well as Roddy McDowall's sister-in-law Bronwyn Morgan in How Green Was My Valley (1941).
John Ford's drama about a Welsh mining family, which was shot in California, went on to win the Oscar for best picture, and marked the beginning of a lengthy association between the actress and the legendary director. She had supporting roles in seven other Ford films, including the classic John Wayne westerns Fort Apache (1948) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which also starred James Stewart. She was also Wayne's co-star, playing a nurse, in Flying Tigers (1942) and she had a major role in Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht's dramatisation of the assassination of Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. During the 1950s, she made only a handful of films, concentrating on raising a family and on the new medium of television.
Almost inevitably, her film roles became smaller with the passing years, though she had the distinction of supporting two of Hollywood's grand dames, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in the dark drama What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and she was Sister Margaretta in The Sound of Music (1965).
She had a long list of television credits, from westerns
to panel shows, when she accepted a part in General Hospital in 1978, although she claimed never to have seen a soap. Curiously her character, the wealthy Lila Quartermaine, had the same surname as the hero of King Solomon's Mines.
About a year after her first appearance, she was badly hurt in a car crash and paralysed from the waist down, but she continued in the role for more than 20 years.
Lee was married three times; her third husband was novelist Robert Nathan. Two of her five children, Venetia Stevenson and Jeffrey Byron, became actors, and she was mother-in-law to Russ Tamblyn and Don Everly. She was awarded an MBE in 1982.
Anna Lee, actress; born
Joan Boniface Winnifrith
on January 2, 1913, died
May 14, 2004.
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